President Trump has FINALLY declared that Antifa is a terrorist organization. Glenn Beck explains why Antifa “checks every single box” for this designation.
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: Let me talk to you a little bit about Antifa. Antifa has finally been put on the terror list.
As a terrorist organization, I want to get into this. What it takes to be a terrorist organization. But terrorism is a word that just chills you to the bone, or it should.
The Department of Homeland Security lays it out clearly. Terrorism is the unlawful use of violence or threat of violence, to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence government policy. Or affect the conduct of government through destruction, chaos, or fear.
That's the standard. Okay?
I think that's really clear. To affect the conduct of government, through destruction, yep. Chaos. Uh-huh.
And fear. Now, ask yourself: This is not going to be hard. I'm not going to give you a lot of time to answer this. Does Antifa fit that description?
You knew the answer before I finished the question: Yes, it does. Look at Portland. For years, we saw coordinated campaigns, where so-called antifascists brought, not arguments. Be the debate.
But weapons into the streets. They occupied and shut off the FBI in their own headquarters. Do you remember that?
Nobody did anything. They bring bricks and Molotov cocktails. Fireworks that are aimed at police precincts, and -- and federal -- businesses have been looted and burned. Neighborhoods, terrorized. Whole blocks were seized and declared autonomous zones. Places where the law had absolutely no authority. Now, is that a peaceful protest?
No. That is the textbook definition of using intimidation and violence to instruct the witness not to answer an ideology, and intimidating the government, to do what they wanted to do.
Now, DHS is says that terrorism does not require an international connection.
Homegrown extremists fall under it as well.
But the criteria is really important.
Ideologically motivated violence.
Now, Antifa's stated mission is to dismantle systems of oppression.
But the tools they use are firebombs and street beatings.
Targeting systems, civilians, officials, or institution.
Well, they've assaulted journalists. Shopkeepers.
Police officers, and city employees.
In Portland, they surround the federal court houses, night after night, with the explicit goal of driving the governmental authority out, and burning the place down.
The intent to intimidate or coerce. Ask any small business owner, who had to hang a, we support a BLM sign, just to avoid their windows being smashed if they felt coerced. That is textbook definition of terror. Now, compare that to the groups already on the domestic terror radar.
White supremacist gangs. Ecoterrorists. Foreign-inspired extremists. Through -- the through line on all of this is the same. Ideology, plus violence, equals terrorism.
I plus V equals T. Ideology, violence, equals terrorism. Antifa checks every single box.
Well, but, yeah, but it's not a structured group. That's a dodge. You know it. I know it. That's a dodge.
Al-Qaeda didn't hand out business cards. They didn't say, let me check with al-Qaeda headquarters. Let me seizes.
What does the CEO of ISIS have to say?
Lone wolf jihadists who pledge allegiance on a Telegram channel still gets classified as terrorism because that's the tactics and the outcome that matter.
Antifa operates as a network. But a decentralized network, but connected by shared symbols, shared targets. Shared methods of violence. The DHS criteria, it doesn't require corporate organization charts, okay? It doesn't. Yes. But who is their CFO?
It doesn't have that. What they require is a pattern of ideologically motivated criminal violence. And you have it in Portland. You have it in Seattle. You have it in Minneapolis. You have it in Washington, DC.
The pattern is over and over. Courthouses are set on fire. Police are blinded with lasers. Journalists beaten in the streets. City blocks seized by force. Ordinary Americans are terrified into silence. That is terrorism. So the question -- the question is not whether Antifa qualifies.
Because they do!
The real question that America should be asking today is, why the hesitation to name what they are.
Why doesn't this happen a long time?
Because once you admit that organized left-wing violence can be terrorism, the narrative completely collapses. It's not just angry kids in masks.
It's a coordinated movement that meets the DHS definition of domestic terrorism. It's no longer kids that we just need to understand.
It's college kids that we stop believing. No. It's none of that. Now it's coordinated terrorism.
And if we can call January 6 terrorism. And DHS did. Then intellectual honesty, demands and requires that Antifa, through his the same lens is viewed the same way. Violence is violence. Coercion is coercion.
Fear is fear.
And the people -- the people of Portland and Seattle, and countless other cities have lived through nights of terror at the hands of Antifa. So all that Donald Trump is doing now is just stop pretending. That's the only thing that has changed.
He hasn't come up with some who can't understand plan or anything else. He's just like. Let's stop pretending it's not a terrorist group. Let's actually name what it is. You can't defeat an enemy, if you can't name it!
You know, we would have never defeated the Nazis, if we would have said, well, the Nazis. I mean, it's just kind of a ragtag group.
And it's an ideology. And that's not really -- we would have never defeated the Nazis. We had to name the Nazis what they were. Evil.
Evil.
And not because of their politics. You can be a Marxist.
Stu, what was the name of the communist we used to work with in Philadelphia?
What was his name?
STU: Clinton.
GLENN: Clinton. That's right. And I loved the guy.
STU: Yeah.
GLENN: I just loved him. He was -- he was a diehard Communist. He worked, running the board of my show, and during the show, he would argue back and forth with me, you know, about communism.
And I would be like, Clinton, you're not going to win this argument. But God bless you. You're taking a paycheck. So, I mean. Anyway, and God bless him. I had no problem with Clinton. We were friends. We were friends.
It's not politics. It's about what you do with the politics. If you now take those politics and you decide, you can kill people because you disagree with them. That's a problem.
You can just take the streets and you can burn down buildings. And you can put stores out of -- out of business.
You can firebomb streets. That's when your ideology, becomes terrorism. Because you've coupled your ideology with violence.
I plus V equals T.
That's DHS. That's the law.